


on the other hand

by shslastronaut



Category: Free!
Genre: Character Study, Drabble, M/M, POV Second Person, Poetic, Possibly Unrequited Love, Relationship Study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 15:13:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13592760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shslastronaut/pseuds/shslastronaut
Summary: on one hand, he’s the most beautiful boy that you have ever known.





	on the other hand

**Author's Note:**

> i got back into free! again. i'll eventually spit out some decent stuff and not just... whatever this sad thing is. this was mostly just a practice thing but felt like, w/e ill post it anyways.
> 
> i love sousuke, ,

You’re Sousuke Yamazaki and you have had a crush on your best friend for as long as you can remember.

What was once a colorless backdrop of white noise and vaguely shifting scenery became saturated hues of tacky rainbow swim trunks and the tangy orange popsicle juice, sticky, clinging to your fingers as you wrestle in the dirt, just the day you met him.

Two kids chasing each other down the street, playing pretend and dreaming of paradise; his: the olympic stage, and yours: anywhere next to him.

And then he’d found some place new.

In truth, you knew not to be jealous of Nanase. Rin might have been inspired by him, stuck on him, but it wasn’t in a romantic fashion. It’d been in search of his dream. You still had a place that no one else could fill beside him, you think. You’d like to think that. You’d like to tell yourself that at night to keep all the nightmares out.

Maybe you should’ve left your heart back in Tokyo. Maybe coming back just for one last year beside the boy you’d hopelessly fallen for was a terrible idea.

How he wasn’t able to catch onto your feelings, you have no idea. How you still felt them so ardently after all this time, you’re definitely more clear on. Though you were only children, he was definitely the one who got away- the one who turned your bleak and vacant world into something bright, shiny, and new. Just being in his presence, you’re filled with that light again. Every time your hands slap and bang together, in a fistbump or a secret handshake, in a high five or… the moments when they linger, you’re renewed of your strength.

When your eyes touch from across rooms and you think that there shouldn’t be anything except social convention stopping you from running to his side, you know that you’re in too deep.

Shouldn’t you be able to pull him into your arms when you’re on the couch? Shouldn’t your warmth meet and mingle, and burn him up the way it’s been burning you for longer than either of you have been alive?

It’s true, you think that you’ve known him in a past life. You understand him in a way that makes him feel unsettled. It’s special, and uncomfortable, and it is the truth that’s between you.

You’d like to think that maybe when he’s clinging to his pillow in his sleep that you could be what he needs, if he’d let you- if he’d let someone in.

As closed off as you may seem to anyone who could try to break your walls down, you know that you’d shed every one of them like a depressing strip tease if Rin asked it of you- if he wanted to know… if he knew that you were hiding anything from him at all. If he looked at you, maybe the way he looked at Nanase, you seethe.

In the meantime, you feel your hues fade in and out. You fear for his inconsistencies and how they make you sweat. On one hand, he’s the most beautiful boy that you have ever known.

On the other, he’s the empty mailbox.

He’s the spaces between your ribs that leave your heart exposed.


End file.
